5 trends that will impact digital transformation initiatives

Digital transformations are fundamentally changing the way organizations across all sectors operate — a trend that is poised to continue into 2019 and beyond. According to recent trends released by DXC Technology, business transformation continues to accelerate.

Enterprises are making big bets on digital strategy to invent new markets, redesign customer experiences, deploy advanced analytics against a more converged information base and simultaneously gain operational efficiencies to reinvest further in a digital future.

Programmers work at the Maluuba Inc. office in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2015. Several leading Canadian researchers and professors have defected to U.S. tech companies such as Google. Already members of the country's AI community are trying to protect what they helped build. A startup called Maluuba, which makes technology that helps computers talk, is opening a research office in Montreal; the University of Toronto has opened a startup accelerator and this fall launched a program dedicated to AI research. Photographer: James MacDonald/Bloomberg

James MacDonald/Bloomberg

As businesses continue to embrace innovation, the following five trends should remain top of mind for organizations looking to continue to drive their digital transformation initiatives in 2019.

Digital business moonshots

In 2019, continued competition from increasingly digital peers will drive enterprises to make more aligned, bet-the-company execution decisions to accelerate innovation. Given this, companies should focus on executing a single and well-defined digital strategy that unifies the business and IT to overcome the limits of legacy technology that hold companies back from exploring further digital initiatives.

Next-generation IoT platforms take hold

As enterprises continue to map the physical world to an intelligence-rich digital one, smart “things” will become a driving force for implementing next-generation platforms in 2019. This advance will enable large quantities of industry-specific data from the internet of things (IoT) to be analyzed, uncovering novel, hyper-dimensional correlations that provide fresh insights, enhance decision-making capabilities and improve business outcomes.

Organizations will benefit greatly from leveraging digital platforms to interpret mass amounts of data and enable correlations that wouldn’t otherwise be possible because there are simply too many factors for the human brain to process. For example, collecting data from heart monitors, fitness watches, the human genome and more can lead to the best possible diagnosis of a condition and, therefore, the most effective treatment plan.

Having the right IoT platform to analyze data will increase the ability of enterprises to make discoveries and become innovators.

The age of information enlightenment

In 2019 there will be more data available than ever before. To capitalize, companies must be able to understand their data, know how to manipulate and analyze it, and be able to use it to make better and faster decisions.

Artificial intelligence will be increasingly built into applications to analyze behavior patterns and better exhibit intelligent behavior needed for efficiency, improved service offerings and new sources of revenue.

The IT industry will also continue to build out what is called “the Matrix,” the pervasive, intelligent IT infrastructure that goes beyond the cloud to include edge computing, IoT, machine intelligence, blockchain and more.

In 2019, companies will develop novel ways to leverage this Matrix to put intelligence closer to the data, driving the shift toward event-driven applications and serverless architectures.

Redesigning customer experiences

With the rise in high-profile data breaches over the past several years, customers are seeking solutions to protect their data now more than ever.

And with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now in effect, companies are being forced to rethink their digital strategies to accommodate consumers’ need for improved data privacy. Companies engaging in better data protection practices also tend to improve customer experience as a result, building customer trust and loyalty — both necessary aspects of the social license to operate required in 2019.

These practices will also lead to changes in the data landscape, particularly in marketing databases, demand generation systems and customer relationship systems.

Coinciding with growing IoT trends, companies will go to greater lengths than ever before to ensure that data from all devices is protected. Enterprises will need to create privacy-centric information ecosystems — with analytics and security top of mind — as the foundation to guarantee secure interactions and data privacy.

Decline of the data center

As data management and business processing continue to shift to the cloud, the relevance of the enterprise data center is poised to diminish further in 2019.

Contributing to this shift, information processing will continue to become a utility that is widely distributed, as public cloud providers operate more efficiently with greater bandwidths and strategically placed data centers, enabling enterprises to derive more value from their data through them.

Digital transformation is a very real and companies are experiencing today. By adopting new and efficient technologies that will accelerate growth and improve business outcomes, companies will position themselves for success in 2019 and beyond.